1. Field of Disclosed Subject Matter
This disclosure relates to systems and methods for facilitating more consistent feedback from end-users of image forming and media handling devices that is supplemented by recent activity log information for the image forming and media handling devices on which the end-users provide the feedback.
2. Related Art
Companies, including suppliers, manufacturers and service providers, make extensive beneficial use of customer or end-user feedback regarding their products and services in whatever form that feedback may be provided. Customer or end-user feedback can aid in addressing current concerns regarding the products and services, but can prove invaluable in, for example, setting the standards for development of the next generation of products by a particular manufacturer, or revising how services are delivered by a particular service provider. Customer or ended-user feedback then provides an important mechanism by which a manufacturer or service provider can interact with its customers and end-users to enhance current and future experiences for the customers and end-users with the provided products and services. In this manner, the manufacturer or service provider can improve an overall quality of service to the customer or end-user based on particular needs highlighted by the customers or end-users. All of this may have a pronounced effect on a customer's or end-user's willingness to continue to do business with a particular manufacturer or service provider.
In order to be most effective, a customer's or end-user's feedback regarding operation of, or interaction with, a particular product should be informed, complete and timely. Further, to the extent possible, the feedback should be provided in the context of the particular operation of, or interaction with, the product that may have occasioned the customer or end-user chose to provide the feedback. This operating context is often overlooked by the customer or end-user in providing feedback. Also, when it is provided, the operating context may be inaccurate or incomplete based on the customer or end-user failing to fully understand relevant details in the operation of the product or specific operating limitations relevant to the product.
Unfortunately, feedback from customers and end-users tends to be haphazard and inconsistent. Companies have attempted to address the inconsistent nature of customer or end-user feedback in a number of creative ways. Despite those efforts, however, the process of collecting usable, consistent feedback continues to suffer certain shortfalls. For example, when companies reach out to solicit specific feedback from, for example, high-frequency users, the users are often unreachable. The direct solicitation of specific feedback often comes at a time that is inconvenient for the user such as when the user's attention is directed elsewhere. Otherwise, the direct solicitation of specific feedback may come at a time that is well attenuated from any specific incident or event that may have prompted usable feedback, positive or negative. In these later cases, it is rare that a user is able to recount, on a spur of the moment and in sufficient detail, information regarding the operation of a particular system that may aid the company soliciting the feedback in ascertaining the precise nature of ongoing difficulties, and/or a user's desires and frustrations with regard to a particular system in question.
Customers may be surveyed or interviewed for the purpose of determining trends, requests, weaknesses or complaints regarding particular products or families of products. The individuals targeted by these surveys or interviews, however, may not have at their disposal current pertinent information by which to be able to provide specific relevant feedback. The individuals may be able to recount general impressions, but may otherwise simply not recall the details of a particular incident or operation of the products at a level of detail that may aid the company in taking appropriate corrective action with regard to currently-fielded products, and/or otherwise provide a basis for design changes to address the concerns or suggestions that may be raised as future products are developed and manufactured. By their nature, customer surveys and interviews may only provide the company conducting such surveys and interviews with a less than complete story regarding any particular issue that a customer or end-user may have. Experience with the product that is the subject of the survey or interview typically extends over months prior to any request for feedback being solicited, or otherwise any pertinent feedback being offered. Additionally, given the nature and timing of these surveys and interviews, any appropriate context regarding the operations of, or the operating limitations associated with, the products that may be relevant to any issue raised in a particular survey response or interview is lost. As a result, issues that are of concern to the product users, or needs and wants that could otherwise be addressed in the operation of the product, often go unarticulated when feedback is sought in the above manner. Also, despite a company's best efforts at soliciting feedback from an appropriate level of users, many individuals with valid or useful inputs are never reached.
In a networked computing environment, some companies have chosen to become more aggressive in their solicitation of feedback from day-to-day users of their systems and component products. These efforts often manifest themselves in attacks on users with pop-up boxes being presented on the display screen of a user's workstation when a particular action requested by the user via the workstation is recognized by the system as an action programmed to trigger a specific feedback request. Among the difficulties with these types of solicitations for feedback is that they all-too-often occur when there is no need for the user to provide any feedback. If the triggering action, for example, was performed in the manner expected, there may be no reason to prompt the user to provide any response. Further, this type of feedback solicitation may be viewed by users as an increasing nuisance when it appears on too many occasions. When such solicitation happens all too frequently, some users may tend to become, in a sense, anesthetized to the presence of these pop-up boxes and simply dismiss them out of habit resulting in a failure to employ the mechanism provided for its intended purpose when interaction with a particular product such as, for example, an image forming device or a media handling device with which the workstation communicates, may warrant providing the requested feedback. Finally, these automatically presented direct solicitations of feedback, even if they were to prompt a particular user to provide some response, suffer from the same shortfall in other methods in failing to provide any appropriate operating context for the product, as discussed briefly above, which may be particularly germane to the subject matter of the user feedback. Aspects of operations that may prompt user feedback relate to media handling as well as image forming operations. Media folds, tears, wrinkling, displacement during feed or transport and jams are common to a number of media handling and imaging devices. The term “image forming device” includes imaging devices and document and media handling devices.